Imagine young, sixteen-year-old me at the end of my junior year. It was time to start thinking about topics for my senior project. What was I going to do? What could I explore that would be worthwhile and make a real impact? What did I want to learn? How could I grow my skills and knowledge?
All I wanted to do was thru-hike. When I was twelve I went on some short backpacking jaunt somewhere on the Appalachian Trail with my family and as I cruised down the trail at probably a relatively slow pace that was nevertheless way ahead of my mother and brother, I happened to gaze upon some over-tan, under-shaved ruffians with folding sleeping pads strapped to the tops of their colorful packs. They passed me and sped on at an outrageous pace, chatting jovially. Who are these people, I wondered, and how can I be them?
I was informed that they were thru-hikers, and they had come all the way from Georgia, and in fact a couple thousand people did this every year. Immediately I knew I wanted to be one of them. But I didn't want to wait until I was older; I wanted to do it now. I wanted to be the youngest ever to do it. And I wanted to do it alone. Who needs people when you can do everything yourself, on your own two feet? Sure I was twelve, but I was definitely ready. I told everyone what I was going to do. I was going to beat Chipmunk, who thru-hiked when she was fifteen. Or did she really? Her parents drove an RV for her to sleep in every night and she had to flip-flop because she was too slow to get to Katahdin, the end of the trail, by the end of the weather window. I wasn't going to do that; I was going to do it right. A few months and very little research later, I discovered the Pacific Crest Trail. It is to the AT what homemade vegan chocolate lava cake is to a storebought cake mix. No crowded shelters every twelve miles; no three thousand foot lumps of earth that pass as mountains. The PCT has Southern California desert, the Sierras with thirteen thousand foot mountain passes, the old growth Pacific Northwest rainforest, and the granite peaks of the North Cascades. This was what I was going to do, but this time I had enough sense to know I wasn't ready yet. So I stored my dream away in the back of my mind for later.
In junior year I decided I couldn't wait any longer, I didn't want to wait any longer; what was I doing, still here? Was I accumulating knowledge or dust? I wanted to hike. I wanted to walk each day until I was exhausted and sleep hard on the ground with no tent, only the stars above, and get up bright and early at 6 am and do it again and again. It was time, I must do it. And I had a senior project coming up! Perfect, I thought.
Predictably, the idea of missing the last three months of senior year to go for a very long hike didn't go over so well with the people in charge. Ok, I thought, what else can I hike? I hatched the idea of hiking a route inspired by a book I had read, Dawn Land by Joseph Bruchac. In this book the protagonist, an Abenaki teenager living near Lake Champlain around ten thousand years ago, goes on a journey from his home in modern-day Vermont to somewhere in upstate New York. I decided I would recreate his journey and create some sort of media along the way--photos? drawings? journal entries?--that documented the way that the land and its use by humans has changed from the descriptions in the book of an imagined past. Looking back I wish I had chosen this project, but for some reason the amount of unknowns it posed overwhelmed me and I decided to do something seemingly more manageable.
Searching my brain for ideas I remembered the treehouse I often played in as a child at the community where I used to live. My mom had designed this treehouse and built a scale model which won a community-wide design competition. I figured, why don't I do that? Building things is a very useful skill and one that I don't have much experience with. Perfect, or something near it.
Throughout the year I discovered that I have even less experience in building things than I thought and that even thinking about undertaking the project I had set out to do--building a complete upright structure--filled me with involuntary terror. Partly because I had no idea how I was going to do it and I wanted to do it well rather than flail around in the dark, and partly because I knew that this project didn't represent the conclusion of my interests or ambitions or what I value most in my life.
I would like to thank my mentor, Steve Worth, for being patient with me while I had this inner crisis and assisting me with the building process. Lifting two pressure-treated 2x12x12s eight feet in the air and drilling them into trees is no easy feat, and he always offered his gentleness and expertise and even sacrificed a yak trak to the snow.
With the help of Steve and my dad, I succeeded in building the initial supports for my future treehouse on a three-tree site at my family's farm in Northampton. The platform and house remain unbuilt. With the onset of the coronavirus, I realized that I had an opportunity to do something more personally meaningful with my project. I had decided I was going to hike the Long Trail in Vermont after graduation and it was time to start buying the gear I would need and planning the food I would eat.
I had spent a lot of time throughout the year learning about the various aspects of ultralight hiking including the nutritional requirements of thru-hiking and how to make trail food as light as possible. With the month and a half or so before the due date for this project, I planned and created my "ideal vegan resupply", expanding upon other vegan resupply plans that had obvious drawbacks, and I made a few YouTube videos explaining this product. You will see these videos and more information about my resupply plan in the rest of this website.
Enjoy, and I hope you learn something in case you decide to do some thru-hiking in the future!